POTUS Pounded

Romney scored big against Obama  last night in the first of their three debates, as most of the pundits, left and right, agree.  When Romney came out with the "trickle-down government" line, I gave him a big 'thumbs up' to the mild amusement of my wife who, bless her heart, insisted that we watch the debate instead of a 1965 rerun  of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  (I was tempted to blow off the debate, expecting nothing but the usual bullshit.) 

But Romney should have repeated the excellent line that sums up the whole leftist approach: we take your money which, by rights does not belong to you but to the collective, and we dribble back to you such benefits as we see fit.  (Karl Marx: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.")  Obama 2016 provides evidence that this is the ultimate Obama agenda.

Romney should have pounded away with the "trickle-down government" line.  Repetition is necessary to get through to Joe Sixpack.  Romney is still too gentlemanly.  Politics, however, is not gentlemanly debate but war by other means.  Leftists have understood this all along.  Conservatives are slowly learning.

So while POTUS was pounded, he did not receive the plenary pounding that he needs.  Work for the next two debates.  Romney needs to slug harder while maintaining  his smiling 'nice guy' demeanor.

Is the Middle East Exempted From the Rules of Civilized Behavior?

The attitude of liberals towards Muslims is similar to their attitude toward blacks and other minorities: they don't demand much of them.  For example, liberals expect that blacks in significant numbers will lack photo ID and will  therefore be  'disenfranchised' if asked to present such at the polling place as common sense requires.  Such a low opinion  do liberals have of blacks!

I now hand off to that national treasure, Victor Davis Hanson, whose piece The Neurotic Middle East begins like this:

Let us confess it: Many of the things that are bothersome in the world today originate in the Middle East. Billions of air passengers each year take off their belts and shoes at the airport, not because of fears of terrorism from the slums of Johannesburg or because the grandsons of displaced East Prussians are blowing up Polish diplomats. We put up with such burdens because a Saudi multimillionaire, Osama bin Laden, and his unhinged band of Arab religious extremists began ramming airliners into buildings and murdering thousands.

The Olympics have become an armed camp, not because the Cold War Soviets once stormed Montreal or the Chinese have threatened Australia, but largely because Palestinian terrorists butchered Israelis in Munich 40 years ago and established the precedent that international arenas were ideal occasions for political mass murder.

There is no corn or wheat cartel. There are no cell-phone monopolies. Coal prices are not controlled by global price-fixers. Yet OPEC adjusts the supply of oil in the Middle East to ensure high prices, mostly for the benefit of Gulf sheikhdoms and assorted other authoritarian governments.

Catholics don’t assassinate movie directors or artists who treat Jesus Christ with contempt. Jewish mobs will not murder cartoonists should they ridicule the Torah. Buddhists are not calling for global blasphemy laws. But radical Muslims, mostly in the Middle East, have warned the world that Islam alone is not to be caricatured — or else. Right-wing fascists and red Communists have not done as much damage to the First Amendment as have the threats from the Arab Street.

Whether Atheism is a Religion

Yesterday I objected to calling leftism a religion.  Curiously, some people call atheism a religion.  I object to that too.

The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer.  It is not even clear that the question makes sense.  For when you ask 'What is religion?' you presuppose that it has an essence that can be captured in a definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions.  But it might be that the concept religion is a family resemblance concept like the concept game (to invoke Wittgenstein's famous example).  Think of all the different sorts of games there are. Is there any property or set of properties that all games have and that only games have?  Presumably not.  The concept game is a family resemblance concept to which no essence corresponds.  Noted philosophers of religion such as John Hick maintain the same with respect to the concept religion.

If you take this tack, then you can perhaps argue that Marxism and secular humanism and militant atheism are religions.

But it strikes me as decidedly odd to characterize  a militant anti-religionist as having a religion.  Indeed,
it smacks of a cheap debating trick:  "How can you criticize religion when you yourself have a religion?" I prefer to think along the following lines.

Start with belief-system as your genus and then distinguish two species: belief-systems that are theoretical, though they may have practical applications,  and belief-systems that are by their very nature oriented toward action.  Call the latter ideologies.  Accordingly, an ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs.  Then distinguish between religious and non-religious ideologies.  Marxism and militant atheism are non-religious ideologies while the Abrahamic religions and some of the Eastern religions are
religious ideologies.

But this leaves me with the problem of specifying what it is that distinguishes religious from non-religious ideologies.  Perhaps this: all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana.  But I expect the Theravadins to object that nibbana is nothing positive and transcendent, being only the extinguishing or dissolution of the (ultimately illusory) self.  I could of course simply deny that Theravada Buddhism is a religion, strictly speaking.  I could lump it together with Stoicism as a sort of higher psychotherapy, a set of techniques for achieving equanimity.

There are a number of tricky and unresolved issues here, but I see little point in calling militant atheism a religion, though I concede it is like a religion in some ways.

But as I pointed out yesterday, if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the other or is a species of the other.

Leftism: The World’s Most Dynamic Religion?

Dennis Prager answers in the affirmative:

For at least the last hundred years, the world’s most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.

It has been leftism.

Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

While I agree with the rest of Prager's column, I have trouble with his characterization of leftism as a religion. 

It is true that leftism is like a religion in certain key respects.  But if one thing is like another it does not follow that the first is a species of the other. Whales are like fish in certain key respects, but a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Whales live in the ocean, can stay underwater for long periods of time and have strong tails to propel themselves. Just like fish.  But whales are not fish.

I should think that correct taxonomies in the realm of ideas are just as important as correct taxonomies in the realm of flora and fauna.

Leftism is an anti-religious political ideology that functions in the lives of its adherents much like religions function in the lives of their adherents. This is the truth to which Prager alludes with his sloppy formulation, "leftism is a religion."  Leftism in theory is opposed to every religion as to an opiate of the masses, to employ the figure of Karl Marx.  In practice, however, today's leftists are rather strangely soft on the representatives of the 'religion of peace.'

Or you could say that leftism is an ersatz religion for leftists. 'Ersatz' here functions as an alienans adjective. It functions  like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.'  A decoy duck is not a duck.  A substitute for religion is not a religion.

An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs.  That genus divides into the species religious ideologies and nonreligious ideologies.  Leftism, being "overwhelmingly secular" just as Prager says, is a nonreligious ideology. It is not a religion, but it shares some characteristics with religions and functions for its adherents as a substitute for religion.

You might think to accuse me of pedantry.  What does it matter that Prager sometimes employs sloppy formulations? Surely it is more important that leftism be defeated than that it be fitted into an optimal taxonomy!

Well yes, slaying the dragon is Job One.  But we also need to persuade intelligent and discriminating people.  Precision in thought and speech is conducive to that end.  And that is why I say, once more:  Language matters!

Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

This from an English reader:

As you may recall, I'm a persistent reader of your blog – even when the 'topic of the day' goes right over my head.

On the minimalist version of Pascal's wager, you summarize: "So how can I lose? Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits."

I've mulled over this rational incentive to believe in God many and many a time. But belief doesn't come. If faith is a 'gift from God' or depends on the possession of a religious disposition, then for some unfathomable reason I've missed out. I guess there are many people like myself who are 'trying to believe' but don't and perhaps never will succeed. (And it's not from the want of pressure and sometimes disinterested tuition, when I was a lad, from my Jesuit teachers.)

I think the sorts of pragmatic considerations I adduced the other day  in support of the rationality of religious belief will leave unmoved someone lacking the religious disposition.  (I'll leave aside the question whether the religious disposition is a divine gift.) Without the disposition the issue cannot be a "live option"  in William James' sense.  You have to be antecedently inclined to take seriously the possibility that some form of religion is true.  This has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge or upbringing.  Not intelligence: there are both intelligent and unintelligent theists and atheists.  Not knowledge: there is no empirical knowledge that rules out theism or rules in atheism.  Not upbringing: some are raised atheists and becomes theists, and vice versa.  What you need is a certain sort of spiritual depth that is present in, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but absent in, say, Daniel Dennett.  If you are 'surface all the way down' religion won't get a grip on you.

In the reader's case religious belief seems to be a live option in the way in which it is not for most atheists.  (For most atheists, and for all of the militant atheists, the truth of some religion is no more a live existential option than numerology or Marxism is for me.)  But for the reader, apparently, the disposition is not enough.  I wish I could help him.

Let me just state what, in my own case, are the additional factors, factors beyond the religious disposition, that move me to accept religious belief. 

1. The Manifold Failures of Naturalism.  There are four questions that need answering. 

The first is why there is anything (or at least anything concrete and contingent) at all.  This is an intelligible question but there is no good naturalist answer to it.   The physicist Lawrence Krauss recently made a fool of himself over this question as I demonstrated in earlier posts.  The second question is how life arose from inanimate matter.  Life has to have arisen before natural selection can go to work upon random mutations.  The third is how consciousness arose in some living organisms, and the fourth is how self-consciousness, conscience, reason and all related phenomena arose.  There are many, many questions here, but it is widely accepted that naturalism has failed to give adequate answers to them.  Naturalists give answers all right, but they are no good. For the gory details, see my Naturalism category.

Now of course nothing I said will convince any naturalist, but that's not my purpose.  My purpose is to explain how one can reasonably take religion seriously.  I could not take it seriously if naturalism were true. The refutation of naturalism therefore removes an obstacle to religious belief.  If, on the other hand, you are convinced that naturalism is true, then you cannot, consistently with that conviction, accept theism — whether or not you have a religious disposition.

It is also important to realize that if naturalism as we currently know it is false, it doesn't follow that some form of theism is true.  It doesn't even follow that no form of naturalism is true.  It could be that there is a version of naturalism, over the horizon, which will adequately answer the questions I mentioned.  If I have understood the thrust of Thomas Nagel's latest book, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012), that is what he is aiming at.  He is trying to find a way between naturalism in its current onfiguration and theism.  He wants to be able to see mind as somehow essential to the fabric of nature and not, as it must appear on evolutionary naturalism, as an accidental byproduct of purely physical processes. 

It is also worth noting that not all of the critics of contemporary evolutionary naturalism are theists.  If they were, then one might suspect that their criticisms were ideologically motivated.  Not so.  Nagel is both an atheist and an opponent of contemporary naturalism.  Given that Nagel's 'middle path' is merely a gesture in the direction of a possible distination, as opposed to a concrete alternative, I think it is resonable to accept theism given the hopelessness of naturalism.

2. Mystical, Religious, and Paranormal Experiences and Intuitions

Suppose that someone (i) has the religious disposition and (ii) agrees that theism is superior to naturalism.  That still might not do it.  Abstract reasoning, even to intellectual types who flourish in its element, is no substitute for experiences.  In fact, I doubt that anyone could really take religion seriously (in a way that would make a concrete difference in how one lives one's life) who lacked the sensus divinitatis, or the feeling that the deliverances of conscience emanate from a sphere beyond the human, or who never had a mystical glimpse or a religious experience, or who never lived through anything paranormal such as an out-of-body experience or an experience of pre-cognition.

This is not the place to try to explain the differences among mystical, religious, and paranormal experience and other senses, intuitions, intimations, visitations and vouchsafings  that religious types speak of.  But let me give a couple of examples of religious experiences, which I distinguish on the one hand from mystical experiences and on the other from paranormal experiences. 

One day many years ago I was pacing around  in an extremely agitated frame of mind over a matter that I won't go into.  But suffice it to say that my mind and heart were filled with extremely negative thoughts and desires.  Suddenly, without any forethought, I raised my arms to the ceiling and exclaimed, "Release me from this!"  In an instant I was as calm as a Stoic sage, as quiescent as a Quietist.  The roiling burden was lifted.  I was at peace.  I want to stress that that I had had no intention to pray.  The whole episode transpired spontaneously.  Now what happened?  Phenomenologically, my unintended, spontaneous prayer was answered.  Does that unforgettable experience prove that a Higher Power hears and grants some of our heart-felt requests?  No, for the simple reason that no (outer) experience proves anything.  My current visual experiences of this computer do not prove its existence.  But the religious experience is evidence of something Transcendent and if you have had such experiences you may be inclined to think that they carry a lot more weight than abstract reasoning from questionable premises.

On another occasion, while deep in meditation, I had an experience of — or an experience  as of, to put the point with pedantic epistemological caution — being the object of Someone's love.  "I am being loved by some unknown person" was my thought during the experience. That's what it felt like. I was alone sitting in the dark on the black mat.     It was an unmistakeable experience, but still only an experience.  A brain fart you say?  A random neuronal swerve?  Could be, but then our ordinary mundane experience could be a brain fart too — only more coherent and protracted.

There are those who simply dismiss experiences like these.  That is a strange attitude, at once unempirical and dogmatically rationalistic.  See Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored.

It's a bit of evidence that I add to the other bits of experiential evidence such as a deep sense of the superficiality of ordinary human relations, and of the relative unreality and unimportance of the impermanent world.  Without experiences like these Plato, Augustine, Pascal, and Simone Weil could not have written what they wrote.

3. The Arguments for Theism

And then there are the dozens of arguments for theism which, taken together, make a strong cumulative case for theism's truth especially in tandem with the refutation of the atheistic arguments.

4. Conclusion

Now add it all together: the manifold inadequacies and outright absurdities of the naturalist/materialist/reductionist Weltanschauung, the wide variety of mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences, the deliverances of conscience, the testimony of beauty and order and purposivesness, and the rest of the intuitions, intimations and senses, the refutations of atheism and the arguments for theism — add this all together, take it as a big cumulative case, and its just might take someone who has the religious disposition over the line into a living belief.

And THEN, and only then, comes the capstone that clinches it for someone like me:  "So how can I lose? Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits."   

October Again

And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with a reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973.  I was travelling East by thumb, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack.

Here is a shorter (3:58) excerpt with great images.  It includes the first section and about half of the second, pp. 37-39 in the Black Cat edition.  Here is the second, longer excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of the piece, pp. 37-40.

An Aphorism of Mine Translated into Slovak

Dear Mr. Vallicella,

My name is Cyril Šebo, I am an English teacher in Slovakia and also a blogger on our national Slovak blogspot

http://cyrilsebo.blog.sme.sk/clanok.asp?cl=309289

Today is The International Day of Translators and in my blog I dared to use one of your thougts from your blog, to show how difficult it can get to translate some thoughful ideas into another language.

Your statement I have borrowed was, "Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole man."

I also suggested a translation and encouraged the readers to provide their critical analysis and possible (better) translation variants.

The blog post has received a very good following so far, people especially speculated about the poetic figure of "grating clangor" and the philosophical aspect of the "unwhole man."

Somebody also suggested a reversed translation of one of the Slovak versions into English: "Silence is a scratch and clangor in the ear of a man lacking inner integrity."

If your time allows, can you please let us know, whether this is close to your original idea, or is it absolutely ridiculous?

Thank you very much,

Cyril Šebo

Dear Mr. Šebo,

I am glad you enjoyed my aphorism and found it stimulating.  I wrote it on 3 January 1972 while a young man  living in a garret in Salzburg, Austria.  When I opened the skylight in the bathroom I got a view of the Salzburg Festung, 'fastness' being a nice  old poetic English word for Festung.


Salzburg4As for your reverse translation, I would say that it conveys the idea that I was trying to express, but does so in a way that violates one of the rules for a good aphorism.  The good aphorist aims at economy of expression. A good aphorism is terse.  "Scratch and" is superfluous, as is "to the ear."  Clangor is a loud ringing sound; sounds are perceived through the ears; so there is no need to add "to the ear."  'Clangor' has the added virtue of sounding like what it means.  The 'resonance' of the word is diminished by the addition of "scratch and."  "Unwhole man" is a more poetic and economical way of saying "man lacking inner integrity." But that is what I meant.

At the time I wrote the aphorism I may have been reading Max Picard who wrote a book entitled The World of Silence.  Here is something about Picard.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death

JamesTomorrow is the 57th anniversary of the death of James Dean.  When the young  Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight.  One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene.  He died  in 2010 at the age of 88.   But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming?  His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:

Jan and Dean, Deadman's Curve (1964).  But it is not just boys who are drawn to speed, little old ladies have been known to put the pedal to the metal.  Case in point: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln (1960)

James Dean, Public Service Announcement

James Dean, The 'Chicken' Scene

Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby

Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston, Rocket 88 (1951).  The first R & R song?  With footage of Bettie Page.

Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young


James_dean_died_here

 

 

 

 

The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

Is it ever rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence? If it is never rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence, then presumably it is also never rational to act upon such a belief. For example, if it irrational to believe in God and post-mortem survival, then presumably it is also irrational to act upon those beliefs, by entering a monastery, say. Or is it?

W. K. Clifford is famous for his evidentialist thesis that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." On this way of thinking, someone who fails to apportion belief to evidence violates the ethics of belief, and thereby does something morally wrong. This has been called ethical evidentialism since that claim is that it is morally impermissible to believe on insufficient evidence.  Sufficient evidence is where there is preponderance of evidence.  On ethical evidentialism, then, it is morally permissible for a person to believe that p if and only p is more likely than not on the evidence the person has.

A cognitive evidentialist, by contrast, maintains that one is merely unreasonable to believe beyond a preponderance of evidence.  One then flouts a norm of rationality rather than a norm of morality.

Jeffrey Jordan, who has done good work on this topic, makes a further distinction between absolute and defeasible evidentialism.  The absolute evidentialist holds that the evidentialist imperative applies to every proposition, while the defeasible evidentialist allows exceptions.  Although Clifford had religious beliefs in his sights, his thesis, by its very wording, applies to every sort of belief, including political beliefs and the belief expressed in the Clifford sentence quoted above!  I take this as a refutation of Clifford's evidentialist stringency. For if one makes no exceptions concerning the application of the evidentialist imperative, then it applies also to "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  And then the embarrassing question arises as to what evidence once could have for the draconian Cliffordian stricture which is not only a morally normative claim but is also crammed with universal quantifiers.

If I took Clifford seriously I would have to give up most of my beliefs about politics, health, nutrition, economics, history and plenty of other things.  For example, I believe it is a wise course to restrict my eating of eggs to three per week due to their high cholesterol content.  And that's what I do.  Do I have sufficent evidence for this belief? Not at all.  I certainly don't have evidence that entails the belief in question.  What evidence I have makes it somewhat probable.  But more probable than not?  Not clear!  But to be on the safe side I restrict my intake of high-cholesterol foods.   What I give up, namely, the pleasures of bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  etc. is paltry in comparison to the possible pay-off, namely living  and blogging to a ripe old age.  Surely there is nothing immoral or irrational in my behavior even though I am flouting Clifford's rule.  And similarly in hundreds of cases.

The Desert Rat

Consider now the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources?  Let us suppose that our man is a philosopher and thus committed to a life of the highest rationality.

Absolute evidentialism implies that the desert wanderer should suspend judgment and withhold assent: he may neither believe nor disbelieve of either source that it is potable or poisonous on pain of either irrationality or an offence against the ethics of belief.

On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief  — and doing nothing in consequence — would clearly be the height of irrationality in a case like this.  The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By simply opting for one, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the alternative is certain death.

He may be epistemically irrational, but he is prudentially rational.  And in a case like this prudential rationality trumps the other kind.

Cases like this are clear counterexamples to evidentialist theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence and never believing on insufficient evidence.   In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for an embodied  human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as Clifford demands. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe on grounds other than the evidential.  Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable? In Jamesian terms the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even, which is neither live, forced, nor momentous.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. 

But then absolute evidentialism is untenable and we must retreat to defeasible evidentialism.

The New Neighbors

Let us consider another such case. What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people — a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them — is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

In the cases just mentioned, one is waranted in believing beyond the evidence, but there are also cases in which one is warranted in believing against the evidence.  In most cases, if the available evidence supports that p, then one ought to believe that p.  But consider Jeff Jordan's case of 

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore reject absolute evidentialism, both ethical and cognitive.  We should admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that I (in consequence) have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

And what if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives better his last moments than he would have by giving up.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what?  What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

Hitchens: No Understanding of Religion

Reading Christopher Hitchens' Mortality I was struck once again by how people like him have no understanding of religion at all.   Lacking as they do any religious sense, they can only (mis)understand it from the outside as if it were just a set of strange doctrines. They don't seem to understand that the doctrines are "necessary makeshifts," to borrow a fine phrase from F. H. Bradley,  whereby we undertake to understand the Transcendent.  Failing to appreciate the provisional character of doctrines and dogmatic formulations, people like Hitchens seize upon them as if they were the reality represented and then look for contradictions and absurdities. And of course they find them.  For example, Hitchens sees an absurdity in prayer:

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.  Half-buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self-cancelling. (Mortality, pp. 21-22)

The context makes this this little 'chemo-brain' outburst even less clear, if that is possible.  Prayer, we are told, is the attempt to instruct God on how to set right what he has has got "all wrong."  Now that has nothing to do with what anyone who actually prays means by 'prayer.' Take Plotinus (205-270):

The only way truly to pray is to approach alone the One who is Alone [All-One]. To contemplate that One, we must withdraw into the inner soul, as into a temple, and be still. (Enneads)

Did chatterbox Hitchens ever withdraw into his inner soul and be still?  No?  Then what right does he have to speak of these matters?  This from the Talmud:

He who rises from prayer a  better man, his prayer is answered.

The point here, I take it, is that we don't pray to change God so much as to change and improve ourselves. If we succeed in this, if we succeed in stilling our thoughts, mastering our desires, strengthening our resolutions, and re-directing our aspirations from the base to the noble, then we have succeeded in improving ourselves and our prayer has been answered.  Here, in a similar vein, is Ralph Waldo Emerson from his great essay "Self-Reliance":

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

Hitchens has no understanding of religion or of prayer.  The two are closely linked as William James observed:

Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. (Varieties of Religious Experience, 464)

In his profound incomprehension, Hitchens takes prayer in its crassest petitionary sense, oblivious of the iceberg submerged beneath that paltry tip.

Lacking as he does the religious sensibility, Hitchens is devoid of all sympathy for it, and can't see anything good in it.  His understanding of it is the misundertanding of the outsider.  To understand religion from the outside is  like trying to understand music from the outside as a peculiar sort of acoustic disturbance.  But religion, like music, chess, love, poetry, mathematics, running, science . . . can only be understood from the inside by those who engage in these activities and have the inner predisposition and talent to engage in them.